Hacker Mindset to be Successful at Anything

Before starting, I want to clarify several things about hackers. In this article, the word “hacker” doesn’t mean people who commit crimes by stealing other people’s information or professionals who apply security tests to systems. In this context, this word simply means a person who can understand a complex system. That’s it. Let’s keep definitions simple.

The most important question here is how a hacker understands a complex system. There are several ways. For instance, if you want to achieve this in an open-source system, the best way to understand this is first to read the documentation, and then try to use it. After that, if you want to dig it more, you should read the tests and source code. However, in most of the real scenarios, generally, the system is a black box. Then, what is the best way to understand it?

In signal processing, generally, the signal processing system is assumed as a black box. We don’t know what’s inside this system. The way to understand the behaviour of the system is by applying a simple impulse or step pulse signal to the system, and analysing the output.

However, these abstractions are made in a theoretical space. In real life, we cannot apply a perfect impulse or step pulse to the system. To be clear, we might have very limited access to the corresponding system. In such a case, hackers don’t give up. Basically, they assume the system is a black box and analyse the inputs and outputs. By checking inputs and corresponding outputs, they try to understand the model and create a representative model of the system in their mind. After some point, since they understand the system's behaviour, to get what they desire, they find the correct inputs to put into the system. It’s a very simple idea but hard to implement.

Until this point, we clarified what a hacker is and their mentality. The good thing about this mindset is that we can apply it anywhere because we can model anything as a black box concept. For instance, consider Medium. You’re writing articles, which is your input, and money, viewing, getting fans, etc. is your output. In your job, you’re giving some effort to do something and they’re paying you for your job. You only need to decide about the inputs and outputs (there may be more than one input and output), the rest is a black box. Simple.

The next step, the hacker's purpose is getting the desired output. At this point, you should understand how the system works. To achieve that, you should analyse as many as possible input-output scenarios for the black box you’re considering. You should understand how the output changes when you change one input. After understanding all relations between inputs and outputs, it means that you have a general understanding of the system. The last system is easy after that: To get the desired output, learn in which way you should change your inputs. Then, the only thing remaining is to put this into place.

I can give you a very simple example of this idea: Let’s say you want to become a great machine learning engineer. Since the cool part of being an ML engineer is making research and trying new stuff, you want to work in companies like OpenAI, DeepMind, Google, Facebook, etc. What you should do? To achieve such a thing, you need some skills. How to improve your skills to become that good? What do others do? Generally, the pioneers in this area write papers continuously to share their new ideas. You should be able to understand them and implement those new ideas in a simulation environment concerning different test cases. Hence, you can read lots of papers (especially the famous ones), and then you can try to implement them until gaining enough skills.

To be honest, I’m not the mastermind behind this mindset. I learned this thing in a live programming video made by George Hotz, one of my favourite hackers. If you want to watch the video, I’m linking it below. The first hour of the video is definitely worth watching.

Thanks for your time and kind regards.